Quilt as Verb, Noun, and Concept

Call it art about art and the lives of others. One of the new exhibitions pulling us into the Santa Barbara Museum of Art bears a self-revealing title, Remixed: Entwined Histories & New Forms, showcasing the work of artists bringing new conceptual art ideas to the ancient art/craft of quilting.

Quilting is a natural referential feeding source of inspiration in this selection of art, regarding quilting as a grassroots and early form of the art-world impulse of appropriation. But there are also natural allusions to the art of the remix, which relies on reshaping and retooling existing musical and sound content, as well as jazz, in which improvisationally riffing on established tunes and structures — “changes” — is part and parcel of the art form. 

One fascinating early strain of quilting culture in America goes back to the Gee’s Bend quilters, originated by Black women in Alabama in the 19th century, and involving dazzling abstractions going beyond the decorative. An acrylic and gold leaf piece, Adia Millett’s “Patchwork Gold,” nods towards the influence of Gee’s Bend art. The image imagines a sunrise, underlaid with wave bands of stripes and vivid color, punctuated by echoes of the sun motif, to hypnotic effect.

Many of the works here lean into the idea of tapping into lineages of personal family and heritage, of conversing with ancestral wisdom and artistic practices. The largest piece in the show is Jeffrey Gibson’s “Protect the Land,” blending his connection to his Mississippi Choctaw Indian blood and his contemporary gay identity. Tribal regalia and imagery are “remixed” with elements of ’90s club culture.

Basil Kincaid, a seventh-generation quilter, weaves vintage and past-life-tinged fabric scraps into “A Day at Victoria Gates,” channeling ancestral memory in a literal and artistic way. Nearby, Maia Ruth Lee’s found art sculpture “Bondage, Baggage Mothering II” sits sentient on the floor, in three tightly bound parcels. The art refers to the portable method of toting collected belongings of Nepali immigrant workers. By association, the concept relates to unhoused people everywhere, including Santa Barbara.

A more purely artistic objective runs through Michael C. Thorpe’s “Blue Lagoon,” in which the artist “paints with fabric and thread” to create a minimalist, gently abstracted landscape vision.

Layered and “cross-stitched” meanings find their way into many of these pieces, as seen in Candice Lin’s “the alchemy of predator and prey,” which refers to the seemingly innocent world of Chinese blue-and-white ware in its mirror-like symmetrical design. But it is deceptive and only partially decorative, with links to various products dispersed on the east-to-west Silk Road — spices, stylistic cultural exports … and opium. 

Comic content comes in the form of Jeffrey Sincich’s “Injured? Call Now,” consisting of a set of pillows on a bench in the gallery. (A guard informed me that this is the one piece in the show visitors are allowed to touch — and actually sit on.) The point of reference is the bus bench ads by injury lawyers, a tawdry tradition here rendered into something almost sweetly folksy.

On a partially unintended political note, Carla Edwards’s “Gape” takes aim at, and actual fabric from the American grain, well, the American flag, to be exact. A flag has been cut into strips and “discolored” or otherwise altered in rough-hewn ways, restitched into a composition of the artist’s own devising. Is she honoring the creative spirit and individualist ethos of the American ideal, or desecrating or at least casting suspicion on the downward turn of events and government rule in the nation? It’s open to interpretation, as with many other pieces in the gallery. 

Along with being a pure treat for the eye, Remixed is a valuable contribution to the continuing effort of museum culture to lend deeper respect and understanding the possibilities stitched into the fabric of quilting. 

Remixed: Entwined Histories & New Forms is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1130 State St.) through August 30. See sbma.net/exhibitions.